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This is a bit of a different post today. Relevant if you use Salesforce to send out emails (which I do often in my day to day job). It also has some other great uses too – auto filling text fields, checkboxes / radio buttons on websites.

What you’ll need to get it working is to either be using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as your browser. Grab the extension or addon called “Autofill” by thdoan. Here is a direct link to the Chrome version:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlmmgnhgdeffjkdckmikfpnddkbbfkkk. Once that is installed in your browser, you’ll need to figure out the “id” of the text field that you want auto filled. In my case I wanted to automatically fill out an email address field in my Salesforce emails. I started a new email, then right-clicked the page to select “Get Page Source”. After some searching through the source of the page, I managed to find an “id” of value “p5” for the BCC email address textfield. To help, I just searched the source for “bcc” to start with to get to that section of the source. Once you have the id of the control or field you want to autofill, it is quite easy to set up the rest.

Open the extension / addon settings, select the button for a new rule (the little plus sign). In the new rule “Type” dropdown, select “Text” for a text field. The name will be your “id” you have located. So for my BCC field, I entered a name of “p5”. The “value” will be the text I want to populate this field automatically. So I entered the email address as the value. You can leave the “site” field blank if you want, but this restricts the rule to whatever you specify here. In my case I entered eu1.salesforce.com so that this rule would only ever apply to URLs I am working with that work on this domain / site. This is quite useful, as if I had to ever come across another site with a text field id value of “p5” it would suddenly populate with the email address I specified as a value – so in my case it is useful to specify a site. You can also use Regular Expressions in this field for more flexibility. Once you are done, just click “Save” at the bottom.

The next time you load up a page with that textfield id, autofill should work its magic and fill it in with you. You don’t even need to click the field. There are tons of other uses that this addon / extension can provide, so have a look at the default options that are provided to get some ideas.

Just experienced this issue myself cloning a VM to another LUN / Datastore on a slightly older vSphere 4.0 update 1 environment. A quick google of the error message “Cannot clone VM-NAME1: Number of virtual devices exceeds the maximum for a given controller.” pointed me toVMware KB Article: 1016221which clearly states that this is an issue when you select the “Edit virtual hardware (experimental) checkbox in the clone settings wizard.

Here is what the Tasks and Events section reports (blanked out the VM name and a host IP if you notice the missing parts).

To work around this, just make sure you don’t tick the “Edit virtual hardware (experimental) checkbox when you clone the VM. Edit the hardware after your clone has complete in the usual way. Apparently this occurs on both vCenter 4.0 and 4.0 update 1. Just another reason to move to vSphere 4.1 if you are still on 4.0!